by Adam Hall
So you have to compromise.
Chong heaved at the tailboard. He wasn’t a strong man, too thin, too light. But he was winning: he’d got it to shoulder level. The sergeant watched him struggling.
You have to compromise. You leave it as late as you can, and then decide. You go into the cell and look around and see what they’ve got for you, how serious they are, how professional, and you look at the people who are going to work on you, and make a decision. If they look as if they’re prepared to take things to the limit and you don’t feel within you at this particular moment the ability, the spiritual, almost supernatural ability to go through anything, anything at all, then you go as fast as you can for the capsule and crack it with your teeth, finito.
‘La shi shenme?’
Sergeant shouting.
I knew my capabilities, what they would be when we arrived in the interrogation cell. But I didn’t know what his would be, Chong’s, and it worried me because he knew where Xingyu Baibing was, and that would be their only question.
‘La shi shenme?’
The sergeant had moved to the tailboard. I couldn’t quite see what was happening because Chong’s body was in the way, but I think he’d tried to hide something, push it among the other stuff in the truck, and the sergeant had seen him, wanted to know what it was.
‘Na guolai gel wo!’
Chong gave it to him, some kind of wallet, and the sergeant opened it, holding it in the glare of the jeep’s headlights, and I was close enough to see a wad, two wads of Chinese banknotes with elastic bands round them.
‘Zhe yonglai gan stenmede?’
‘Xunllan gdngren de gdngzhi.’
Wages, for the drilling crew? There wasn’t any drilling crew.
They were Y 100 banknotes, if both wads were the same. It looked as if there were two lots of perhaps fifty. At a rough guess, the equivalent of £1,000 sterling. The sergeant was looking at them, looking at Chong. Chong was saying nothing. The engine of the jeep throbbed steadily in the background; the exhaust gas clouded blue in the headlight beams.
It’s on record that the pay of a sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army runs at about Y 200 a month. This one was looking at twenty month’s pay.
‘Ni xiang hulluo wo?’
‘Dangran bushi.’
Asking Chong, perhaps, if he was trying to bribe him. But he couldn’t be. There wouldn’t be any price on the honor and prestige of this man if he could find the archenemy of the People’s Republic of China, Xingyu Baibing. Chong would know that.
‘Henghao!’ The sergeant pushed the wallet inside his greatcoat and went on talking, and when he’d finished Chong turned to me.
‘Okay, he says we have to stay right where we are. When he’s back in the jeep we have to get into the cab of the truck and head for the roadblock up there. He follows us. Christ sake don’t make any kind of move, okay? He’s mad at me.’ He turned back to the sergeant and gave him a careful bow.
The sergeant began walking backward to the jeep, keeping the assault rifle at the hip.
‘You know the worst thing, for me,’ Chong said, ‘about Tiananmen? They turned the lights out before they started the massacre. Don’t you think that was obscene?’
The sergeant swung his assault rifle into the jeep and Chong took his glove off and put a hand into his pocket and there was a dull flash and the sergeant bloomed like a huge crimson flower in the night.
‘Don’t you think that was obscene,’ Chong said, ‘turning the lights out?’
Chapter 19
Bells
Something brushed my foot, a rat, I think.
I stood still, just inside the doorway. It was as far as I had got. I watched the two great beams of timber, above my head and to my right. There was a gap there, where the balustrade along the second floor had broken away. The movement had been there, just now. I had seen it when I had come in.
They were everywhere, the rats. You heard them squeaking. It was winter, and they were desperate for shelter all over the town, desperate for food.
The movement had been just there, in the gap along the balustrade, or what I’d thought was movement. This was the door the abbot had shown me earlier. I could come in this way without disturbing the monks: I’d told him it was important to me, not to disturb them in their prayers, their daily life, and in part it was true. But he understood. It mattered more to me that I wasn’t seen coming or going.
The moon was high in the south, its light slanting in rays through the breaks in the timber where the roof on that side had been destroyed; the rays were gray, substantial, like a milkness in water, because of the incense they burned in here, and the yak-butter lamps with their smoky wicks. I was used to the smell of this place; it was pungent, a presence; it only faded after I’d been back here for an hour or so.
Dpal Idan mgon po …
It was close on midnight, a time, I suppose, for the last prayers of the day. The chanting was not loud; it came from the big hall on the east side of the monastery, where the huge gilded Buddha sat, brought here from a gutted temple after the uprising, the abbot had told me.
Po spyan hdren na a …
Small bells rang at intervals. The chanting and the bells didn’t worry me; the whole ruin was already alive with sound: in the intense heat of the sunshine during the day the timbers swelled, and at night cooled; their straining was as familiar and as particular to this place as its smell, and I was used to it. It was a kind of silence, and unfamiliar sound would alert me.
Movement again and I caught it but not in time to identify it before it was gone. I kept still, waiting for minutes, then took a step across the earth floor, sighting again from a new angle. At this point hallucination began, the eyes becoming jaded by the unchanging view, the mind presenting phantasmagoria for them to look at. I let them close and stood for minutes on end, clearing the images.
Perhaps it had been the same kind of illusion when I’d come in, the movement I’d seen, thought I’d seen. Or possibly there were owls here. It was time to go forward, find the first ladder and climb. Xingyu Baibing was in danger, here now; the police and the PSB had called in the military to help in the search and they’d set up roadblocks everywhere and soon they’d be beating on every door in the town, searching every building, house, hotel, temple, monastery.
Chong was waiting outside with the big Jeifang.
It had taken three hours to get here, moving overland and keeping clear of the roads and their intersections, coming up against terrain that wouldn’t allow even the big truck across it, turning back a mile and going north again, keeping a watch on the lights flashing far in the distance.
‘Little thing I learned from the CIA.’
We’d been bumping and rattling for nearly two hours since we’d left the jeep, over rocks that split under the weight of the front wheels and sent bright slivers flying through the moonlight. I was waiting for a tire to blow.
‘How to make them?’
‘Yes.’ The little remote-control bombs. ‘They were designed for automobiles and planes, but I’ve used them a few times on people. They’re good. I call them people-boomers. I got a few bigger ones stashed away, building boomers. You need any, you tell me.’
He’d driven the military jeep half a mile and run it into a ravine deep enough to hide it from level sight. They’d see it all right from a chopper in the morning but we couldn’t do anything about that; all we wanted was enough time to get to the monastery and take Xingyu Baibing to a new hide-out. There was no hope of getting him to the airport now.
We’d left the sergeant to the birds.
‘He’ll be picked to the bone inside of two hours from first light,’ Chong said when he got back into the truck. ‘There’s a sky-burial site a couple of kilometers from here, that direction. The birds know where to come. Then, get a wind, the rest should be covered in silt, but the military are going to look for the bastard anyway, once they find the jeep.’ He peeled some chewing gum. ‘Did me a whole lot of go
od, you know? Drop in the ocean, sure, but I got a real kick out of looking at all that red in the moonlight, head coming off - did you see the head coming off? Kind of making a personal statement, lighting one little lamp in Tiananmen, you know the trouble with guys, I mean guys as distinct from gals? They’re so fucking romantic. Glory of war, all that shit.’
I let him go on talking as we drove the big Jeifang north; he didn’t want any answers, any questions. I was getting to know him; underneath the easy manner there was rage burning, in the name of Tiananmen.
‘We got enough gas,’ he said after a while, ‘for maybe another fifty kilometers, this kind of ground, if the tires hold out, got two spares. Got food, I brought some army rations, canned stuff, last awhile, the two of you.’
Xingyu and myself. Chong would make his way back and report to Pepperidge and provide liaison.
I put my feet on the top of the dashboard to ease the muscles, head was all right, wasn’t throbbing so much now in spite of the bouncing around. A crack had started in the windshield; this wasn’t shatterproof glass. The whole truck was taking a beating and that couldn’t last forever, perhaps not even for fifty kilometers.
‘What are the chances,’ I asked Chong, ‘of finding somewhere for him between here and the airport?’ He knew the region better than I did, and I could be missing something.
He turned to look at me. ‘We don’t have any. We don’t have any chances. Go south with him on board, we’re just putting him into their hands.’
‘North then,’ I said, ‘within fifty kilometers, what have we got?’
‘Few farms. Few more monasteries, up in the hills. Yak herds, nomad camps, couple of mining sites.’
‘They’ll check all those. The military.’
‘Bet your ass they will. They got choppers, go where they like, put troops down and beat the bushes.’ A front wheel hit a rock and something smashed, I think a headlamp.
‘Shit.’
I asked him if there were caves.
‘Caves? You bet. Few hundred.’
‘How big?’
He half-turned on the seat, interested. ‘All sizes, I guess, but there’d be plenty with enough room for just two people, no crowding, you know? Some of them big as a ballroom. Sure, you could do that for a couple of days, maybe more if you had to.’
I thought about it. The objective for Bamboo was to fly Xingyu Baibing into Beijing, assuming the coordinator replacing Sojourner had managed to take over without any delay. But we couldn’t do that now. All we could do was keep him from being flushed out and sent to Beijing and brainwashed and pushed in front of the cameras, the return of the prodigal son, penitent, reformed, an example to others who thought fit to impede the onward struggle for socialism.
‘That’s the plan?’
Chong was watching me, taking snatched glances away from the moonlit rocks ahead.
‘There’s nothing else,’ I said, ‘we can do.’
‘Okay. Have to do it tonight, use the dark. That sun comes up, we’re going to see a sky full of choppers looking for that fucking sergeant.’
That had been an hour ago, and now he was waiting outside the monastery with the truck. It didn’t need two of us to fetch Xingyu Baibing.
Thugs rje hdul dang dbang …
I crossed the earth floor and climbed the ladder. If there had been movement, if it hadn’t been an errant flicker of hallucination, I would find out what it was at close range. The first ladder had a tilt to the left, and I put my feet on the other side, testing the rungs. This was the ladder the monks used, Bian the guard and his replacement; they brought water from the reservoir, and food, and changed the sanitary bucket. It was a good strong ladder, and the tilt didn’t worry me. It was something else that worried me.
I stopped climbing and let the data come in, the chanting and the bells and the moonlight and the scent of the incense and the lamps, the feel of the rough wood under my hands, while the primitive brainstem signalled the nerves, opening the pupils by a degree, stimulating the olfactory sensors, turning the tympanic membranes to sweep the environment for unfamiliar sounds, sensitizing the tactile nodes of the fingers and palm, returning me to the ancient status of the animal in the wild seeking the means for survival, the skin crawling now and the hairs lifting on the scalp because of the scent I’d detected, strange and sweet and unfamiliar here, perhaps dangerous.
I couldn’t identify it, couldn’t find the key, the association with other things, other environments where I’d smelted this scent before. I waited, standing still on the ladder, and let the mind range on its own, taking slow breaths to present the stimulus. Nothing came. Nothing came and I climbed again, watching the long gallery on the second floor, watching the gap where the timbers had fallen during the fire, watching for movement.
Ldna na … Dpal ldan mgon po …
My boot scraped a splinter from a rung of the ladder and I heard it fall, because it was silent here in this huge derelict place, with a silence beyond the chanting and the bells and the creak of the beams as the cold contracted them, a silence in which all I could consciously hear were unfamiliar, unexpected sounds, the animal brainstem tuned to them, and this was good, this was as it should be, the senses taut, alert beyond the norm; but I was not reassured. There was still something else, other than the strange sweet unfamiliar scent, that was causing the gooseflesh, lifting the hair on the scalp.
Screech of a night bird somewhere and I felt the sweat springing, saw lights for an instant leaping against the dark as the nerves were fired.
I stopped moving, absorbed the shock, climbed again. Still something else, but I was beginning to know that its source wasn’t physical, sensory. Information was shimmering at a level of awareness beyond the conscious, as subtle as the trembling of a web, and it was bringing fear into my spirit, bringing desolation.
But let us not, my good friend, lend ourselves overmuch to the imagination: the organism is under stress, and prey to fancy. Let us rather climb to the gallery and find things out.
You know it’s true. It’s not just your imagination.
Yes, but what can I do about it, for God’s sake?
The ladder gave a little when I reached the top; one of the rawhide straps had worked loose, but no matter, I was safe enough, I was on the gallery and this was where the movement was, the one I had seen from below. It was a colored rag, hanging across a strut of timber and moving very slightly in a draft of air; it must have dropped from the floor above, and caught across the rough woodwork. I hadn’t noticed it the first time I’d come; perhaps it hadn’t been there.
Po spyan hdren na a …
Faint now, the voices below, the muted tinkling of the bells. What were they praying for down there where the great gold Buddha sat with his fat stomach and his enigmatic smile? For peace on earth and goodwill to all men? For a brave new China and the blessings of democracy? For the sergeant down there across the trackless wastes, or perhaps for Dr. Xingyu Baibing, the new messiah? Let them pray for him, above all pray for him.
Screech of that bloody bird, enough to scare the wits out of you as they say, I suppose it was one of those that wheeled and dived across the burial site that Chong had spoken of, as I’d seen them doing in Bombay, and there’s a euphemism for you, sky-burial, a pretty thought but what it means when you get down to it is that you leave your dear ones out there under the sky and those bloody birds come down and pick at them, taking chunks of flesh in their great hooked beaks and flying off with them, plundering the dead I would rather call it, the flesh tearing under the talons - nor is it the time, though, to be morbid, no, I take your point, standing here on the gallery with the sweat seeping along the skin and the hackles raised and the fear of Christ in me because of that strange smell and the intelligence that informed my spirit that something had gone wrong here in the monastery tonight, horribly wrong.
Chapter 20
Dawn
‘The subject has been seized.’
I waited, giving him time.
‘I don’t know. They killed the monk on guard.’
Waited again. Pepperidge would want to put the questions in order of their priority and I left it to him. He’d have to signal London as soon as I’d rung off, and they’d want the precise facts. The mission had crashed and I didn’t know what they would do, put another one together with a standby executive, fly people in from Hong Kong, call out everyone they’d got in Lhasa, sleepers, supports, agents-in-place, God only knew what they would do, if there was anything they could do at all.
‘When would you say it happened?’
There was a lot of crackle on the line but I suppose that was normal for this place. ‘I can’t say for certain. One of the monks said he thought he heard something like a shout, not long before we got there. Call it between twenty-three-thirty and midnight.’
Chong watched me from the cab of the truck. He’d broken the lock on the gates of the depot to get me inside to the phone and then brought the truck up to block off the entrance. His face looked smaller than ever at the window of the cab, cold, pinched, his eyes watchful, pain in them, it hadn’t been his fault but it had bruised him: he’d been called in by Pepperidge to support a major operation and the subject had been Dr. Xingyu Baibing, the messiah, and he’d only been with the mission a matter of hours before it had crashed, and on the long nerve-wracking trip south across that appalling terrain he’d been terse, brooding, banging his fists on the rim of the big wheel and shouting above the din of the truck, cursing in Chinese, cursing or praying, I didn’t know which, then falling quiet for an hour, two hours, finally finding his center and talking normally, the rage and frustration buried again behind the easy, American-style manner.
He watched me from the cab, turning sometimes to check the street. In the sky behind him, to the east, a crack of saffron light lay across the horizon. Neither of us had eaten, slept, washed for the past twelve hours, rations in the truck but we couldn’t touch them, no appetite for anything but the rancor in the soul to chew on.